This is a searching examination of the life, work, and mysterious disappearance of the charismatic civil rights activist Oscar Zeta Acostaa leading figure in the Chicano movement of the 1960s..

Based on Ilan Stavans' new translation which accurately captures the verve of the original, this Norton Critical Edition includes: an introduction and explanatory annotations; contextual materials highlighting the novella's strong anticlerical views and its affinities with Don Quixote in depictions of social hierarchy in Renaissance Spain; as well as excerpts from Juan de Luna's Lazarillo sequel; and eleven critical studies.

With the release of the census figures in 2000, Latino America wasanointed the future driving force of American culture. The emergence of Spanglish as a form of communication is one of the more influential markers of an America gone Latino. Spanish, present on this continent since the fifteenth century, when Iberian explorers sought to colonize territories in what are now Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and California, has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. The nation's unofficial second language, it is highly visible on several 24-hour TV networks and on more than 200 radio stations across the country.

But Spanish north of the Rio Grande has not spread in its pure Iberian form. On the contrary, a signature of the brewing "Latin Fever" that has swept the United States since the mid-1980s is the astonishing creative linguistic amalgam of tongues used by people of Hispanic descent, not only in major cities but in rural areas as well -- neither Spanish nor English, but a hybrid, known only as Spanglish.

This is a searching examination of the life, work, and mysterious disappearance of the charismatic civil rights activist Oscar Zeta Acostaa leading figure in the Chicano movement of the 1960s..

The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."
This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.

Written with rage and passion about her own journey to creative self-fulfilment against the odds, the novel begins in the hermetic, traditional world of Polish Jewry before the first World War. Deborah is the daughter of an unworldly rabbi. Talented and ambitious but condemned to household chores, Deborah frets that she is not allowed to receive the same education and opportunities as her brothers. She fails in love with a communist but then an arranged marriage is proposed...This is a classic that scholars and fans of the Singers continually refer to for its authentic account of life in the Singer household and the struggle of Esther Kreitman to be free. Deborah was first published in Warsaw in Yiddish in 1936 and later translated by her son Maurice Carr into English in 1946 and published by W.G Foyle. It was republished by Virago in 1983 when her work was still unknown.

Jews and Latinos have been unlikely partners through tumultuous times. This groundbreaking, eclectic book of readings, edited by Ilan Stavans, whom The Washington Post described as "one of our foremost cultural critics," offers a sideboard of the ups and downs of that partnership. It includes some seventy canonical authors, Jews and non-Jews alike, through whose diverse oeuvre-poetry, fiction, theatre, personal and philosophical essays, correspondence, historical documents, and even kitchen recipes-the reader is able to navigate the shifting waters of history, from Spain in the tenth century to the Spanish speaking Americas and the United States today. The Reader showcases the writings of such notable authors as Solomon ibn Gabirol, Maimonides, Miguel de Cervantes, Henry W. Longfellow, Miguel de Unamuno, Federico García Lorca, Jorge Luis Borges, Jacobo Timerman, Mario Vargas Llosa, Ruth Behar, and Ariel Dorfman to name only a few. This volume is sure to become a treasured thesaurus for those interested in a marriage of civilizations whose future will affect us all.

The voice of the Spanish-speaking cultures in the US is stronger than it has ever been, and makes more significant contributions to academic study than ever before. The best way to understand why, and to grasp the changing nature of cultural intersections in the US, is to read this book, which collects the challenging and stimulating writing of Ilan Stavans into one essential volume.

Published in 1542 to an astonished and captivated public, Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition tells the unforgettable story of a sixteenth-century soldier turned explorer who, along with three other survivors of a shipwreck, makes his way across an unknown geographic and cultural landscape. This Norton Critical Edition is based on David Frye's new translation. It is accompanied by Ilan Stavan's introduction, the translator's preface, the editor's detailed explanatory annotations, and a map tracing Cabeza de Vaca's journey from Florida to California. "Alternative Narratives and Sequels" enriches the reader's understanding of and appreciation for Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle, which can be read both as historical record and as fiction (Cabeza de Vaca having written his account years after the events took place). Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdez's General and Natural History of the Indies (1535) provides a different account of the same journey, while sequels can be found in a 1539 letter from the Viceroy of New Spain to the Emperor and in Fray Marcos de Niza's Relacion on the Discovery of the Kingdom of Cibola (1539). The Spanish explorers, soldiers, and missionaries of the period saw the New World as a place of enchantment, riches, and opportunity. This spirit is captured in "Contexts" with documents including a 1493 letter from Christopher Columbus to a potential benefactor of his future travels; Hernan Cortes's 1520 letter from Mexico; and an excerpt from Fray Bartolome's Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542). A selection from Miguel Leon Portilla's Broken Spears provides readers with the viewpoint of the vanquished. "Criticism" includes five major assessments of Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition spanning eighty years. Contributors include Morris Bishop, Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, Paul Schneider, Andres Resendez, and Beatriz Rivera-Barnes. A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index are also included.

An incisive, thought-provoking, and timely meditation, at once panoramic and synoptic, on American literature for an age of xenophobia, heightened nationalism, and economic disparity. The distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans explores the nation's identity through the prism of its books, from the indigenous past to the early settlers, the colonial period, the age of independence, its ascendance as a global power, and its shallow, fracturing response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The central motives that make the United States a flawed experiment-its celebration of do-it-yourself individualism, its purported exceptionalism, and its constitutional government based on checks and balances-are explored through canonical works like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Emily Dickinson's poetry, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, the work of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Toni Morrison, and immigrant voices such as those of Americo Paredes, Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and others. This is literary criticism at its best-informed: broad-ranged yet pungent and uncompromising.

"San Juan: Memoir of a City" conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture.
In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. "In Puerto Rico," he muses, "life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks." Through this book--available here in English for the first time--Rodriguez Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

Superb volume consists of Scliar's six collections of stories published between 1968-89, three of which have never before been rendered into English. Excellently translated, work conveys in fluent, evocative prose Scliar's enormous success in this difficult form. Stories range from biblical parables, through magical realism, to fantastic and humorous accounts. Concludes with a short autobiographical essay"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1951, Ana Maria Shua is one of the most exciting and prolific young Latin American Jewish writers. She published her first book at the age of sixteen; since then she has published thirteen books, including nonfiction, novels, short stories, and children's books. The Book of Memories, originally published in Spanish in 1994, is a humorous yet moving exploration of a Jewish family's history, as seen through the eyes of three generations of women. The story begins with Grandfather Gedalia leaving Poland with forged papers to escape the army and sailing to Argentina, the "other America." Sometimes charming, sometimes stingy, this patriarchal figure, a peddler and sometime moneylender, heads a clan that includes, among others, the feisty and foul-mouthed Aunt Judith and Uncle Silvester, a seducer of young girls who has such high principles that he turns himself in after missing the Argentine police raid on his socialist printing press. From the assorted perspectives of these and other characters, this tale of Jewish immigrants explores life in Argentina, the role of women, and the power and the limits of machismo and nationalism.

From the mean streets of the barrio to the house on Mango Street, from the Mambo Kings to the Garcia Girls, the authors who contribute to this volume transport us across geographies and through cultures in an attempt to articulate the joys, struggles, defeats, and triumphs of the Latino experience in the United States. Growing Up Latino offers, for the first time, a comprehensive collection of classic and recent Latino writing in English, converging in sometimes shocking, often funny, and always stirring memoirs and stories. Religion, sex, love, language, and family are some of the topics explored in this compelling anthology of fiction and nonfiction. With its laughter and tears, its beauty and power, it is a thoroughly enjoyable book and an unforgettable contribution to the Latino tradition of letters. This diverse collection shatters the myth of a singular U.S.- Latino experience, proving the existence of a rich tradition whose writers, active for more than forty years, are only now being recognized by a rapidly growing audience.

Poetry. Fiction. Essays. Latino/Latina Studies. This milestone collection gathers unpublished stories, essays, letters, poems and a teleplay written by Acosta (1935-1974), the Chicano attorney, political activist and writer, between the early 1960s and shortly before his mysterious disappearance in Mexico in 1974.

2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha-an ageless masterpiece that is unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into "a knight in skirts". Freud studied Quixote's psyche. Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges and Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, films and video games, and even shapes the identities of nations. In Quixote, Ilan Stavans, one of today's pre-eminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

"Latino USA" represents the culmination of Ilan Stavans' lifelong determination to meet the challenges of capturing the joys, nuances, and multiple dimensions of Latino culture within the context of the English language. In this cartoon history of Latinos, Stavans also seeks to combine the solemnity of so-called "serious literature" and history with the inherently theatrical and humorous nature of the comics.

Stavans represents Hispanic civilization as a fiesta of types, archetypes, and stereotypes. These multiple, at times contradictory voices, each narrating various episodes of Latino history from a unique perspective, combine to create a carnivalesque rhythm, which is democratic and impartial. "Latino USA," like the history it so entertainingly relates, is a dazzling kaleidoscope of irreverence, wit, subversion, anarchy, politics, humanism, celebration, and serious and responsible history.

"An interweaving of longing and reemergence"
Originally published in Spanish in 2000 and first appearing in English in 2004, "The Letters that Never Came" is an autobiographical novel in three parts that reflects Rosencof's life growing up in 1930s Uruguay as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants and, later, his twelve-year imprisonment during the military dictatorship his country suffered.
Part I is a rich evocation of life in Montevideo in the mid-1930s as seen through the eyes of young Moishe. Every day, Moishe's father waits for the postman, hoping for news of his family, who are prisoners of the Nazis. Interspersed among Moishe's reminiscences are the letters those relatives might have written--but never came.
In Part II, Moishe is imprisoned in the dungeons of the military junta that governed Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s. Tortured and starving, he takes refuge in the world of his imagination, composing another letter that never came--a letter to his father that embodies his own quest for identity.
Part III is largely a meditation on the redemptive power of the word, real and imagined. This poignant, humane work, as Uruguayan and Jewish as it is universal, links the cruelty of the Holocaust to that of the Uruguayan military and the resistance of Hitler's victims to his own.